August 2016 Traffic & Income Report

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Hello Dear fellow bloggers! This is my second month doing a Traffic & Income Report and as I like to say, August has been a “character building month!” I had a breakdown with an email service provider but it all ended up working out in the end, see details below. As a dear friend said, “It is during these times of breakdown, that we experience our greatest breakthroughs!”

I hope that these income reports can help you reach your blogging goals too, or inspire you to start a food blog. What do you blog about? What are your aspirations as a blogger? Please share in the comments below and be sure to subscribe to get my free ebook, “How to Create Infographics for Pinterest that Go Viral”. It is an easy step by step tutorial that has allowed me to get thousands of pins per recipe!

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For the month of August, I had more sessions and users, but I took a dip in page views. Why the decrease in page views? First off, I was on vacation for a week. Secondly, I did a lot of techy stuff! I spent 2 weeks transferring my list over to Converkit, creating new pop-ups, etc. Unfortunately, that did not work out because although their customer service was awesome, they could not fix the technical issue of my RSS feed, so I ended up moving everything back over to Mailchimp, my current provider. It was highly recommended by several bloggers, but it was not the right fit for me. It was a character building experience!

My traffic from Pinterest and google has increased. I continue to pin regularly by using Boardbooster and Tailwind. I love Pinterest because it keeps growing as your recipes are shared and pinned by others. You can see that in July’s Traffic and Income Report I had less sessions, but more page views.

Last month I added descriptions on all my images and this has increased my traffic from Google. I have struggled with getting my google traffic up, but this seems to be working on a small scale. That means every time I upload an image, my image has the name of my recipe, as well as the alt tag, plus, the description has a mini description of what the picture is about. I make sure I am using key words on the description box too.

I added Pop-Up Ally Pro to grow my my email list. I paid $1 for a 30 day trial which is great to try out the product. I added a widget for my Free Paleo Breakfast Ebook to the right side of my blog and a subscription box to the end of each post. This will populate automatically instead of having to add the HTML code manually as I was doing before. These are the easiest pop-ups to create and they have beautiful design templates. I was also able to connect the pop-ups easily to mail chimp. I had 483 new subscribers for the month of August, that is a 14.4% increase in email subscribers. It has been my biggest month ever! I will be transitioning out my current pop up from Ninja Pop-Ups to Pop-Up Ally Pro soon. The difference is that Pop-Up Ally Pro requires double opt-in but Ninja Pop-Up requires single opt-in. I do believe that having the double opt-in will keep really interested readers on my list. They will not want to do the extra work to subscribe if they are not interested in the recipes. I want readers that are engaged and really interested in Paleo recipes. Verifying the double opt-in will help with that.

First and foremost, stick to what is working. I will work on developing more grain free recipes for my audience because it is what they love. Growing my audience one step at a time is what is working.

Second, I will join new group boards to continue growing Pinterest.

Third, continue to invest back into my business by taking courses, reading ebooks and learning from other successful bloggers. This month I finished the Daily Productivity for Bloggers Course. I cut out distractions and created daily to-do tasks as recommended in her course. I love all of Ruth Soukups books on blogging and I can’t wait till Elite Blog Academy opens up so I can take it!

Last, I am not very tech savvy and I like simple courses and service providers that are easy to use and designer friendly. After my email transfer mishap, I will stick with companies that are simple and basic even if I end up paying more. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Well, thats all for this month! I hope you found some helpful tips and please share your thoughts below.